Rajat Narula's Blog, page 4

Room: Emma Donoghue

What a book! An amazing book told from the POV of five-year old who is born in captivity and has never seen the outside world. His mother has been kidnapped and detained by a savage. It starts dark and depressing but the POV of a five-year old makes it a little light. When they escape and make it to real world – it strikes the mother and the son very differently. Brilliant concept, brilliantly executed.

Don’t miss it.

A brief encounter with an anti-vaxxer

When you hear an antivaxxer on the damning effects of the vaccine.

Yesterday, my wife called a friend. As is the case these days, the conversation turned quickly into the status of vaccination. My wife told her friend some of us in the family were done and some were half-way there. She asked her friend if their family had gotten vaccinated yet. The friend told her that they did not have any plans to get vaccinated because the vaccination was all a ploy to get the entire population sterile!

My wife, who lost a nephew to COVID-19 a few months ago, told the friend that the havoc the virus was wreaking across the globe was real, that there had been a death in the family, and any potential side effects of the vaccine were clearly not significant compared to the dangers of the virus. The friend argued that COVID hadn’t killed anyone. It was just like flu (reminded one of another infamous person who said the exact same thing). Crying over the phone, she beseeched my wife to save those of us not fully vaccinated yet!

We were shocked when my wife recounted the conversation to us. We have known the family for a long time: a regular, suburban family in northern Virgina – with aspirations, dreams and fears just like us. It was hard to understand that they actually believed this.

It’s as if we are living in parallel universes. We access and believe the information that we want to believe and these two parallel Americas are drifting further away from each other. Trump deepened this rift and his four years in office have pulled the two Americas apart like never before. But how will this end?

Renaissance Art: Geraldine A. Johnson

A simply written account of art from Renaissance period. The author keeps it simple by providing illustrations and talking about the why the period and its art was special – so it never gets too much for the uninitiated.

Read if you want to learn about Renaissance Art.

Spring in the Neighborhood

It’s a beautiful time of the year. Of tender green buds and colorful flowers blooming overnight. Here are a few pictures of spring in my neighborhood.

Superstitions

Truman Capote steered clear of starting or finishing his writing on any given Friday. If the phone number of the hotel room he was staying in had the number 13, he would change rooms.

Every culture has its share of superstitions. Don’t know what poor number 13 has done – but superstitions related to it transcend cultures. The thirteenth floor goes missing from the buildings across the globe – from Indonesia to Arab world to the west. As if the people on the 14th floor don’t really know that they are actually living on the 13th.

In India, we probably have more than our fair share of superstitions. A black cat cuts across the road and you are supposed to turn back from wherever you are headed. The same if you sneeze stepping out of the house. Whatever you are going for isn’t going to get done anyway. A spoon of yoghurt is the reverse. It would add that extra dose of luck to an exam or a job interview. Lemons and chilies hang from households and vehicles to ward off the evil eye. Clean the house after sunset and you are sure to annoy the Goddess of wealth. Itching palms can mean different things depending on which one is itching. If it is the right one, money is on its way, but if it’s the left, money is going out.

Growing up, I found these superstitions ridiculous and did my best to not follow them – sometimes against my parents’ wishes.

Surprisingly though, some have actually stuck. I don’t wash my hair on Thursdays and not allow any metal objects to enter the house on Saturdays. Not sure how that happened – if something actually went wrong when a pair of scissors entered the garage.

Are there any superstitions you follow despite knowing that’s all they are – superstitions.

Yemen – The Unknown Arabia: Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Tim Mackintosh-Smith has a deep love for Yemen and takes us on a journey to the country – both in the north (Sanaa) – and the South (Aden). He introduces the readers to the multiple tribes, communities and historically significant sites through his travels. And when I say he takes the readers on a journey, he does that effectively. The accounts, despite being commonplace, are so vivid and real that you end up with a good glimpse of the enigma Yemen is. The book is pre-civil war – so it largely keeps away from the politics and the conflict, but does a great job in introducing readers to Yemeni culture. At the end, Mackintosh-Smith leaves us at the rooftop of the house he lived in Sanaa, chewing qat and watching out the city and other rooftops hosting fellow qat-chewers.

Home Fire: Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie picks up a very important subject for ‘Home Fire’: radicalization of Muslim youth in Europe and wedge it has driven in the society. She handles the subject sensitively while spinning a tale that keeps the reader engaged. There is no over-the-top drama but still a convincing account of a young Londoner getting drawn to ISIS and how it upends an already-struggling family. The key characters shine in their own narratives and their respective truths speak to the reader. Despite the book being more than just the radicalization of youth, Shamsie boldly takes us to Raqqah briefly and gives us a snapshot of that world. The book’s only weak point, for me, was the ending. The whole scenario unfolding in Pakistan with the decaying body, the dust storm, and high drama somehow went against the texture of the book.

Beatrice and Virgil: Yann Martel

A major disappointment after ‘Life of Pi’. Beatrice and Virgil are a donkey and a monkey respectively, representing holocaust sufferers, that live on a shirt. A ex-Nazi is writing the story, and our protagonist gets consulted. Except for one portion (end-games for Gustav), that is deeply touching , and brings out the horrors of holocaust, the book is painfully slow and meandering.

The Vanishing Half: Brit Bennett

Bennett takes us to Mallard, a small town in Louisiana populated by light-skinned blacks who practice their own brand of racism; they look down on dark-skinned people. Desiree and Stella, the twin sisters, run away from the town and embark on astonishingly different journeys. It is an interesting story but what makes the book stand out is beautiful, lyrical, insightful writing. Bennett does a particularly great job capturing the subtlety and intensity of the multiple relationships in the book: between the twins, Desiree with her mother and her daughter, Jude and Reese, Stella with her daughter. It was wonderful just to admire such beautiful and wise words pour out on paper.

My All-Time Top Ten Books: Part II

#5 on my top books. Ishiguro takes a scientific topic like cloning and builds a touching story out of it. He takes us to a time in future when clones are reared for meeting human health needs by becoming organ donors and ‘complete’ after a few donations. However, since the clones are human too, they have emotions; they fall in love and they want to live. Ishiguro presents the moral hazards of cloning from the clones’ perspective. A unique story told sensitively

#4 on my all time favorite list. With only three books, Khaled Hosseini has left an indelible mark on modern literature. He has introduced us to the strange, stark world of Afghanistan that we can’t have enough of. His insightful commentary on human relations is thought provoking, moving and heartwarming.

#3 on my all-time favorite list! Roots tells the disturbing account of seven generations of slaves in the United States. Of how Kunta Kinte was abducted by slave traders in an African forest and brought to the U.S. and the generations that followed. The cruelty of humans against humans, the overseas journey where the slaves were kept in their own filth and half of them died at sea, the taming of their spirit on arrival in the U.S, the separation of the families are all captured in their stark brutality. There are a number of scenes that are completely unforgettable. An important work of our time.

#2 on my list. A master-storyteller at the zenith of his craft! Rushdie tells the story of a man and a nation (India) born at the same time and their lives become interwoven through their childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The book was my introduction to the enchanting world of magic-realism. The book won the Booker in 1981 and then the Best of Booker in 2008. No other book deserved the honor more!

#1 on my all-time favorite list. A legendary book from the master of storytelling. A multi-generation saga of Buendias set in the magical town of Macando. Unforgettable characters, an intricate web of a story and magic-realism at its absolute best.